Nature - Platypus: The World's Strangest Animal

The platypus has both baffled and inspired the scientific community since its discovery by Europeans over 200 years ago. Award winning wildlife film maker David Parer takes us down the east coast of Australia to the many serenely beautiful habitats of the platypus. Three years of research and painstaking field work has resulted in a thorough, intimate view of the platypus. We get the usual underwater shots of feeding, as well as the mating dance wherein the male grasps the female by the tail and they swim around in a spiral. Use of transmitter technology allowed location of a nesting burrow, so that access holes could be carefully drilled for infrared cameras to be fed in. The photography inside is very revealing of their behaviour.